Efforts to elect Ashley Hinson to the U.S. Senate and keep the seat held by the retiring Joni Ernst in Republican hands will get a major boost from billionaire and prominent racist Elon Musk. Axios broke the news that Musk has directed his super PAC to spend heavily to boost the chances of Republican Senate candidates in Iowa, Alaska, Maine, Michigan and Ohio, as well as House candidates in California, Wisconsin and Washington.
Musk plans to spend between $100 million and $120 million to help the Republican candidates in those races, the New York Times subsequently reported.
“The precise amounts could change, but Mr. Musk’s financial commitment is seen as secure enough that officials at his super PAC have relayed its budget to groups like MAGA Inc., President Trump’s super PAC — which also has yet to reveal its midterm spending plan,” according to the Times.
Super PACs can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money. Musk created his super PAC, which he named America PAC, in 2024 to support Donald Trump’s campaign for president. Musk delayed creating America PAC until July 2024. July 1 marks the beginning of the Federal Election Commission’s third reporting quarter for PAC fundraising and spending, and those reports are not due until Oct. 15. Musk did not want his spending to be documented in the publicly available FEC reports until just before that year’s Nov. 5 presidential election.
Ultimately, America PAC spent more than $250 million to elect Trump. Musk, the world’s richest man, provided 91 percent of the money the super PAC spent in 2024.
According to Axios, the Times and other news outlets, America PAC won’t start its work on behalf of Hinson and the other four Republican Senate candidates until August, so once again spending totals won’t be publicly reported until just before the November election. (Election Day this year is Nov. 3.) Chris Young, who is Musk’s chief political advisor and supervised America PAC’s spending in 2024, will supervise this year’s planned spending.
“America PAC will focus on door-knocking, digital advertising and direct mail aimed at Republican-leaning voters, including low-propensity voters who typically don’t vote in midterm elections,” ABC News reported.
Musk’s super PAC is “closely coordinating with an ecosystem of outside groups that are preparing field campaigns, including Americans for Prosperity, which is part of the billionaire Koch brothers’ political network, and the Sentinel Action Fund, another conservative organization,” the Times wrote. “Republican outside groups are planning to pool their field operations more than ever after a Supreme Court ruling in late June made it cheaper for party committees to work directly with candidates.”
Musk, of course, was rewarded for being the biggest spender on Trump’s behalf in the 2024 election with a presidential appointment that allowed him and the people he hired to make severe cuts to government agencies and eliminate programs of their choosing. Musk and followers in DOGE, named for a joke meme Musk enjoyed, were also given unprecedented, and in some cases probably illegal, access to confidential government data.
Musk himself is a major government contractor and beneficiary of government subsidies and tax credits. The number, extent and value of the contracts his companies have with the federal government have all increased since Trump returned to office in January 2025.
The cuts made by Musk and DOGE did not result in the savings that the Trump administration originally claimed they did, or come close to the project savings Musk promised it would achieve. In fact, federal spending increased under the Trump administration, even before the president launched his war against Iran earlier this year. The cuts have, however, had major consequences around the world, especially the elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Musk justified his targeting of USAID by repeating baseless and discredited conspiracy theories about the agency that provided assistance “aimed at combatting diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and polio, reducing maternal and child deaths, and fighting malnutrition,” as Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health said in a summary of its work.
In November 2025, Atul Gawande, a medical doctor and a professor of public health at the Chan School, estimated that the elimination of USAID programs “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.”
Other public health experts came to similar conclusions about the scale of deaths resulting from the DOGE cuts, and say the number of deaths continues to increase.
“We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’” Gawande wrote.
Musk has maintained that his DOGE cuts did not result in any public health problems or cause any deaths.
“Zero died because of DOGE,” Musk said in an interview with the editor of The Economist earlier this month. (He later posted a flurry of angry tweets calling her a “traitor to the West” and a “woke NPC.”) “Zero. Point. Zero.”
Hinson, whose committee assignments in the U.S. House include serving on the House Appropriations Committee, has been an outspoken supporter of DOGE. She joined the House DOGE Caucus as soon as it was formed. (Ernst founded the Senate DOGE Caucus.)
“I think this is exactly what the federal government needs,” Hinson told reporters in February 2025, after Musk began his cuts. At the time, DOGE was already shutting down USAID.
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk boasted on X three days before Hinson spoke to reporters.
Following a sudden, bitter public falling out with Trump, Musk either quit or was forced out of his DOGE role at the beginning of June 2025.
“Without me, Trump would have lost the election,” Musk posted on X after his exit from the Trump administration was made public. He also claimed his unprecedented spending in the 2024 election was responsible for Republican Congressional wins, adding, “Such ingratitude.”
DOGE was supposed to continue its work through July 2026. But it quickly faded from prominence after Musk was gone, and in response to a November 2025 inquiry from Reuters about DOGE’s status, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor said, “That doesn’t exist.”
Hinson has continued to celebrate Musk’s and DOGE’s work.
“It is absolutely critical that we continue that work,” Hinson said during a speech to the West Side Conservative Club in Urbandale in March. “I know Elon is no longer the public face of it, but that work is ongoing and those process improvements are happening every single day.”
Hinson typically dismisses critics of Musk and DOGE as proponents of wasteful spending. The three-term congressmember representing Iowa’s 2nd House District has not made any public comments about the impact Musk’s cuts have had on public health around the world, or on the estimated number of preventable deaths they are believed to have caused.
The Trump administration has not investigated the impact of the DOGE cuts, and neither have the Republican-controlled House or Senate. It’s unlikely an investigation or thorough assessment will occur if Republicans retain control following November’s election.
There’s also been no investigation or review of the many lucrative federal contracts Elon Musk’s companies hold, including whether they are cost-effective and what possible role his record-setting political spending has had in the awarding and renewing of those contracts. Such oversight is also unlikely if Republicans retain control of Congress.
Hinson will face Democrat Josh Turek, who represents Council Bluffs in the Iowa House, and Greene County Attorney Thomas Laehn, the Libertarian candidate for Senate, in the Nov. 3 general election. Turek was endorsed by Barack Obama on Wednesday.
